Irish haiku? Irish haiku in New Jersey? Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet of the next generation after Seamus Heaney. Every generation has to clear a space to make itself heard, and Muldoon's way to clear a space in a tradition that includes William Butler Yeats, a visionary and urbane poet, and Patrick Kavanaugh, an earthy country poet, and Seamus Heaney, whom some have said is a perfect fusion of the two impulses, was to write a different poetry altogether, witty, cosmopolitan, playful and postmodern. Lately Muldoon has been teaching at Princeton, and his latest book, "Hay," contains a sequence of haiku, mostly set in New Jersey. Muldoon's way with the form is to observe the syllable count  five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables  and to rhyme the first and last line. Here's a taste: